Sara’s hands gripped my shoulders, and she stared into my eyes.
“Emilia, you are strong. You have made it this far. You can do this.”
“I can’t,” I whimpered. “This is too much. It’s all been bad, but this is too much.” A new thought struck me, and I pressed my hands over my mouth, feeling my lunch in the back of my throat. “People will know, Sara! People will see! What will they say?” I started to cry at last, feeling the shame rise all over again. “I don’t know what’s worse...that people might think I am a whore, or that people will know that I’m not.”
“We will find somewhere for you to go,” she said calmly. “Somewhere safe. The Sisters will help us... You can shelter somewhere until the birth, and then you can start afresh. No one will even know.”
“I can’t do this,” I said again, sobs coming in earnest again now. “Please, Sara. Help me. There has to be a way to stop it.”
“You and I have been through a lot, Emilia. That’s how I know that you can do this.”
By the time we left the orphanage that day, new plans were in place. I’d be moving to a Franciscan convent in Marki. The Sisters would take me in until the baby was born.
“And then what?” I asked Sara numbly.
“Then we will find someone to adopt the baby, and you can move back to Warsaw with Truda and Mateusz to figure out what comes next.”
35
Roman
It had been almost six months since the Uprising had failed. I marked the days with tiny notches on the wooden frame of my bunk in the dormitory at the Stalag XIII-D POW Camp, on the Nazi-party rally grounds in Nuremberg.
“I don’t understand why you’re in such good spirits,” Kacper muttered. This startled a burst of laughter from me.
“No one has ever said those words to me before.”
He and the other Polish prisoners were shocked by the dirty barracks, the broken windows as well as the lack of heating, the worn mattresses and the bedbugs. Some protested at the pits we used for outhouses or the troughs of cold water we were provided for bathing. To those prisoners, such conditions seemed unbearable, but after what I’d endured in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nuremberg camp was a walk in the park. With the bulk of the German ire focused on Soviet prisoners, I soon realized I could keep my head down, work hard at my assigned role in the munitions factory and reasonably expect to survive.
That’s not to say I was disappointed when the Americans liberated the camp in April 1945. We heard whispers that they were coming, and the way the Germans fled as the Americans approached was a thing of beauty. But while my fellow prisoners were all delirious with joy, I was anxious for news of my homeland.
“What is happening in Poland?” I asked a translator, who was working with the Americans to guide us to Red Cross workers for food and medical assistance.
“The Red Army has liberated Poland,” he told me, beaming.
“Liberated?” I repeated incredulously, but my heart sank. “So you’re telling me we have overcome the Germans only to fall under Soviet rule.”
“The government-in-exile is confident that they will be able to regain control of Poland through negotiations.”
“The Soviets occupied half of Poland for the first few years of the war! They only lost that territory because of the German advance. They watched the Uprising fail when they could easily have intervened to help. Now that they have pushed the Germans out of Poland, do you really think they are simply going to leave again?”
I saw his smile fade.
“These American soldiers told me that there are countries all over the world who have offered to take Polish refugees,” he said nervously. “You don’t have to go back.”
“Don’t have to go back?” I repeated. “Poland is my home. Do you think I’ve survived everything this war has thrown at me only to give up on it? Besides, my girl is waiting for me there.”
Unfortunately for Kacper, I had been right about his foot. The Red Cross doctor wanted to amputate it, but with thousands of urgent cases in the camp, he was going to have to wait for his turn.
The poor kid was utterly terrified and tried to convince the doctors to let him return to Poland to seek medical attention there. When we saw pictures of what was left of Warsaw in a newspaper, even Kacper realized this was going to be impossible.
“Will you stay?” he asked. “They say they won’t let me leave until the stump heals.”
I shook my head automatically.
“I need to get back to find my friends.”
“Please, Roman,” he whispered, his voice shaking with fear. “I don’t want to be here on my own.”
“You’ve been a pain in my ass since the first moment I met you, kid,” I muttered, but even so, I could never leave him to face what lay ahead alone. I took a job washing linens in the camp laundry and moved into a dormitory with dozens of other Polish men. Most were planning to immigrate to whichever country would take them, unable to bear returning home. But home was all I could bear. Emilia was there, and I knew that she would be looking for me. I had to find some way to let her know I had survived.
At first, I thought this would be simple: I’d just send her a letter, address it to her old address in Warsaw. But at the camp administration office, a worker told me that the postal service in Warsaw wasn’t operating.
“Have you seen the photos?” he said, grimacing. “Finding an address is all but impossible. The best you can do is to register with us and hope that your girlfriend registers with the Red Cross office in Warsaw, too.”
I added Kacper’s name along with mine to the list of Poles searching for their family members, and he promised to let me know if he heard anything. Within a few weeks, Kacper’s parents had sent a message: they were safe and well, living with his uncle in refugee accommodation in a school hall in Warsaw and anxious for his return.
I spent the next four months in the Red Cross camp, waiting—for news of Emilia that would never come, for Kacper’s surgery and, finally, waiting for his stump to heal.
By the time we were ready to leave at the end of September, I had only two things on my mind: reconnecting with the Resistance and building the future with Emilia that I had been living for.
36
Emilia
Sara thought the baby was due to come at Christmastime, so I would need to live at the convent for at least five months. The day she left me there, she reassured me that this was for the best.
“The routine of life in the convent will make the days pass quickly,” she told me. Truda had made the journey with us to Marki and stayed for two nights to help me settle in.